Social Media Unplugged via …And I Rise

Who wakes up at 6:30am on a saturday to go sit in a dim lit room with 300 other people? I do apparently. I’m talking about the Social Media Marketing Conference I attended last Saturday. Although it was early, the conference was great, the speakers and crowd were great, and I learned alot so it was well worth the early morning wake up call. Here are a few highlights of how it went down…

Last, but certainly not least was Dave Olson, Community Director of HootSuite (@daveohoots). By the time he got on stage the conference was running late and we were all on our 9th hour but his humour and ability to engage the audience brought us all back of life, it was awesome. He enlightened us with the lessons he learned from building a HootSuite community of over 1 million users, these lessons were…

1. Begin with listening

2. Participation is Everything – track and monitor everything and be everywhere – where ever people are talking about or asking questions about what you are doing, be there, always and measure everything.

3. Community Manager as a Party House? Keep people on course, guide them where you want them to go, and be the driver of an exciting bus.

4. It’s all about the story – the tools may have changed but people will still engage in an interesting story.

5. Interestingness – you have to have it.

6. Go Where the people are – go talk to the people, hang out with them on their terms, play their game.

7. Speak their language.

8. Build a posse.

9. Close the loop – bring them back to the main group, back to the community.

10. Let robots do the work.

Overall, it was a great conference – there were alot of nuggets and I’m still shifting through my notes and trying out the different websites, apps, tools etc. I also connected with some really interesting people so I’d say it was a rainy saturday well spent!